Continuing his occasional series on rereading the Booker prize winners, Sam Jordison considers the 1996 champion, Last Orders, and finds that while the debate about Swift's debt to Faulkner is absurd, the novel's flawed vernacular makes it a weak winner
Sam Jordison: Michael Ondaatje's novel was a joint winner of the 1992 prize, but its brilliance is such you can understand why Barry Unsworth's has been rather eclipsed
Sam Jordison: Poignant, subtly plotted and with the perfect unreliable narrator, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about a repressed servant deserved to rise above the clamour surrounding the shortlist in the year of his Booker triumph
Sam Jordison: It's hard to know why The Bay of Noon found its way on to the shortlist. She may have written some great books, but this isn't one of them
Sam Jordison: Keri Hulme's The Bone People deals with hefty issues surrounding Maori displacement. Shame it breaks down too easily into bad writing and spiritual nonsense
Sam Jordison: Anita Brookner's unspectacular novel drew a lot of flak after it beat a better book. But you can't really blame the – perfectly good – book for that
Sam Jordison: JM Coetzee's first Booker winner about passive resistance in South Africa is elegantly crafted, but its protagonist is more clumsy plot device than character – I'm surprised it won
Sam Jordison: A slight but witty tale of middle-class Londoners, this isn't awful, but it should never have beaten both Naipaul and Golding to the prize
